Diaspora entrepreneurship : a study of Nigerian entrepreneurs in London

TLDR: This article explored inter-subjective discourses and situated practices with a view to unravelling the temporal and spatial dimensions of entrepreneurship among Nigerians, the most populous Black-Africans in the UK.

Abstract: The dynamic evolution of Diaspora Entrepreneurship reflects broad range of vistas; profoundly tensing up ‘conventional wisdom’, pressing knowledge boundaries and simultaneously exposing fundamental paradoxes in the characterisation of ethnic-minority groups in the context of their entrepreneurship. Prior efforts at researching and advancing knowledge in this sphere have been hugely complicated, not less by the ‘problematic of subjectivity’. Against this background, this thesis explores inter-subjective discourses and situated practices with a view to unravelling the temporal and spatial dimensions of entrepreneurship among Nigerians, the most populous Black-Africans in the UK. Thus, from contextual lenses of Nigerian entrepreneurs in London, the thesis unpacks the dialectics of diaspora entrepreneurship to allow the formulation and stabilisation of a diagnostic schema. Leaning on the philosophical axioms of interpretive discourse analysis, data are extracted from first-generation Nigerian entrepreneurs principally through the use of narrative interviews. The study finds taxonomical fluidity in the schematisation of contemporary ethnic entrepreneurship as well as its trajectories of growth. Whilst increasingly enmeshed in the evolving phenomenon of diaspora entrepreneurship, ‘home’/‘host’ country dualisms are revealed and found to impact entrepreneurial values and identities. Essentially, the duality of entrepreneurial spaces reveals ambivalent positions, constraining the representation of ethnic entrepreneurship whilst at the same time pointing to new subject position. In both spaces, the study recognises unique trends, opportunity structures and spatial arrangements impacting business development and strategies. The study demonstrates that ethnic entrepreneurship is a plethora of competing and negotiated value systems and meaning structures from which it is possible to assert that diaspora entrepreneurship is a product of persistent interface between multitude of social forces, attributes, states of being, actions, networks, attitudes, emotions, values, and beliefs. Therefore, by revealing entrepreneurship encounters as acts of empowerment, resistance and expression for newly immigrant ethnic groups in Britain, new sites of knowledge are evidenced.